Frozen confections which consist of ice cream, frozen yoghurt, water ice or the like coated with chocolate, frozen fruit juice, or other coatings are popular products. These products are often supported on a stick so that they can be conveniently consumed without being held directly, thus avoiding the consumer's fingers becoming covered with the coating. Chocolate-coated stick products are one example of this type of product that has been known for many years.
Ice cream products on sticks are often produced by an “extrude and cut” process. In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for frozen confectionery products that are shaped in 3 dimensions. Such products can be produced for example by moulding or by the process described in WO 04/17748 using rollers. The ice cream is then dipped into molten chocolate at about 45° C. for a certain time to form the coating. The most commonly used method of dipping, on an industrial scale, is to hold products upside down by their sticks on an indexing conveyor. The conveyor moves the products, stepwise, toward a dipping bath. When over the bath, the products are pushed down in to the chocolate, pulled back up and then indexed away by the conveyor. To achieve the required production speed, the conveyor must be able to accelerate and decelerate very quickly. Therefore, it must have very powerful drives and a heavy sturdy frame to achieve the accelerations and withstand the forces associated with high speed operation. These requirements result in a very expensive and complex machine. In a simpler and cheaper dipping method, the ice cream products are continuously moved though the bath. The products are initially held upside down by their sticks. They are then rotated into a horizontal position in order to clear the side of the bath. They are then rotated back to the upside down (vertical) position, thereby dipping the ice cream into the chocolate while the products are moved along the length of the bath. At the end of the bath they are rotated back to the horizontal position to clear the edge of the tank. Finally they are rotated back to the upside down position to allow the coating to set and the excess chocolate to run-off. However, this method also has disadvantages: the velocity at which the product must pass through the bath can cause the ice cream to be ripped off of the stick, especially if the ice cream has not been completely hardened. Also, this method requires a relatively large dipping tank containing a large volume of chocolate. This increases waste because the chocolate remaining in the tank must be disposed of after a production run.
As an alternative to dipping, spraying can be used to coat stick products. However, it is difficult to achieve complete, uniform coverage and the process can be messy and wasteful. U.S. Pat. No. 4,189,289 discloses a method for producing frozen confections which are sprayed with chocolate. Chopped nuts or cake pieces are then embedded in the chocolate coating. In the spraying process, the ice cream product is held upside down by its stick and chocolate is sprayed through a number of small holes, both from the sides and from beneath, in order to coat the whole product. Spraying has the disadvantage that it produces a matt, rather than glossy, coating.
Enrobing is widely used to coat bar products without sticks. The product is placed on a mesh conveyor belt and passed through a waterfall of chocolate (known as a curtain) typically formed by pumping liquid chocolate through an aperture in the form of a horizontal slot. This operation coats the top, front, back and sides of the bar. An air knife may be used to blow off the excess coating, which drains through the mesh conveyor. Finally, the mesh conveyor carries the product into a shallow bath of chocolate thereby immersing the bottom of the product and coating it. Enrobing is not normally used for stick products because the sticks would also be covered in chocolate. U.S. Pat. No. 4,473,027 describes a process of enrobing stick products while preventing the sticks from being covered in the coating by means of dams in the waterfall which are aligned with the sticks. However, this method requires that the sticks are precisely aligned with the dams. Moreover, it is only suitable for products with at least one flat side and cannot be used to coat 3D objects without affecting their shape.
Therefore there remains a need for an improved process for coating frozen confection products which does not suffer from these disadvantages. In particular, there is a need for a process which can coat shaped ice cream stick products.